If you have been visiting this forum for a while, you know that every once in a while we post statistics on how the site is doing. We do this because we feel that we are all a team here and everyone deserves to know some of the information that pertains to this site. The site is 4 years and 11 months old and considering how young the site is... Well... it appears we are doing great! If this stuff bores you... just pretend this post isn't here.

Don't know where to start so I will just dig in!

In December of 2008, we really started to pick up on new users. In fact, for the past several weeks, we seem to be averaging about 3 new users per day. This is a good thing! September, October and November was pretty dead but then WHAM... we really started to pick up... oh well... I think we were all waiting for the hardwater season. In December we got a bit over 98,000 visits. This was up by about 10,000 from the prvious month. A fact to keep in mind is that analysis of the months going back a couple of years has always shown December and January as our banner months and then things settle down a bit until about a month before the opener... people probably out fishing and not taking the time to go online, eh? We also had an upturn in forum views from November to December. November views were at 178,721 and December shows 213,123. Cool Beans, eh?

All in all, I think the past year went great. Like usual, it is clear that the fall and spring months are busier then the winter and summer months and we are steadily climbing from year to year, overall. This is the best winter season we have had so far and I would like to thank the ice fishing community for stepping in and really keeping the forum going strong. We are getting some good reports from all over the state and that is what this site should be about... I can remember the days when we were getting a post a week... things have changed quite a bit since then and that was just a few years ago. So... keep on moving forward, eh?

The bounce rate has gone down to 36.12% from 56.43%. The Bounce Rate is the number of times a user hits a page and then just leaves. In October it was over 60%. Just a note, though... we used to be very bad at this - a lot of first time visitors hit the home page and then left. This is very much improved from trends we have seen in the past and hopefully it will continue.

In December, 80.18% of all new visits were referred by a search engine - I still get a kick out of this. 6.00% were referred by another site (this is down a bit - it was a bit over 8.9% last month), and 13.82% were not referred. What this means is that 13.82% of the visitors either filled in the site in the browser address bar or bookmarked the site (this is up a couple of points from November).

So what are the most popular pages in December? Well, I thought you would never ask! Here are the top 5...

Ranking has been all over the place on Google, the phrase Minnesota Fishing is popping us up at #9 (went up), sometimes #8. Minnesota Fishing Forum we are still at #2. Minnesota fishermen and Minnesota fishing tournaments we are still #1 - - - HORRAY!!! Minnesota DNR is at #8 and #9 (good deal) - That's a tough one to get, folks! MN fishing reports went from #6 and #7 to #4 and #5. Minnesota fishing tournaments are at #1 and #2 along with mn fishing tournaments. MN fishing pictures are at #1 and #2. MN fishing articles and Minnesota fishing articles, we are at #1 and #2. MN fishing news we went up to #3 and #4. Minnesota fishing news we went down to #3 and #4. Ya da ya da ya da...

I used to give stats on Yahoo and MSN, but what the heck. We aren't getting enough referrals from those search engines to even worry about it anymore. If the market share changes on this, in the future, we will start adding these stats back in, eh?

Some of the phrases being used to find us. Here is a list of the top 10 for all searches...

Anyway, that's it for now. Not bad for a site that is still less then 5 years old (barely)! The birthday for the site is February 26, 2004. That is the first day we went live. I would like to thank everyone for their support. If anyone has any questions, you can post them here.

Oh... I almost forgot... people have asked me to post some of the wacky searches people are using to find the site. I may as well put them here now, lest we have requests for this again...